Why City Benches Are Becoming More Hostile

From NY Times reporter Anna Kodé (whose “intersection of culture and real estate” reporting I’ve been enjoying lately), a short video on the increasingly hostile architecture of NYC.

The spread of the leaning bench and the lack of seating at places like Moynihan or around the city signals to homeless individuals that they are not welcome in these places. It signals to all New Yorkers that these are not social places. These are places to simply pass through.

Here’s a video Vox did on the subject seven years ago.

Being in Japan is offering me such a contrast to so many things in the US. There are benches in public places here and they don’t have spikes all over them. Japan has the world’s lowest rate of homelessness, probably because they take care of people.

In America, we don’t provide housing or much of anything else for people (including a living wage or affordable health care) and the result is that no one can sit down in Penn Station or in a subway station and oh by the way, lots of people have nowhere to live. Why do we do this to ourselves? We could live better lives but we choose not to….for reasons?

Tags: Anna Kodé · architecture · cities · design · NYC · video